I was limited by the processor and some existing ram which basically dictated my purchases to save money.
You’re completely right though, a more modern system would be similar in price and more capable.
I blew my budget on drives and a hot swap case. The rest is easy to upgrade when the time comes.
I purchased a case, SilverStone Technology CS382 8-Bay. Around $200-225.
Bought used parts off eBay:
Asus P8Z77-M LGA 1155 DDR3 SDRAM Desktop Motherboard $75
32GB DDR3 1333 $35
LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-81 IT Mode P20 $35
Nvidia Quadro P620 2GB GDDR5 4x mini DisplayPort $70
I have six 12tb drives (seagate exos), purchased refurb from serverpartdeals.com and had great luck with them and their support. I found that on Reddit data hoarder sub.
I run Truenas. 4 drives for primary. 2 drives for backup of the first 4. And I have a qnap 4 bay dumb raid box for a third backup with old drives I had. My paranoia but not related really to the nas.
Anyway it’s possible and I enjoy what I built. Also that case is loud, get a fan controller too.
I had an Intel s2600 with dual Xeon and 120 gigs of RAM. It seems like such a good idea to run that as a home server. However, the amount of power that it used because it was older was way too much.
I ended up hunting on eBay and found an old Asus motherboard, Intel chip, ram, and a pny Nvidia card.
I bought refurb hard drives from serverpartdeals and a new case from Amazon.
I recommend starting with a chassis you want and working backwards to help narrow your scope.
I know you wanted smaller but heres what I bought. SilverStone Technology CS382… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKTYSZV9?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Also, I run truenas scale with a bunch of apps. Ssd z1 for os. Ssd z1 for transcode and caches. And then 4 drive set for main storage and another 4 drive set for backup of the first set.
I don’t think protonpass has auto fill even on browser extension.
Or maybe I’m too stupid to figure it out. I ran side by side against bitwarden which I love. Could not figure out a way that didn’t make me manually c/p the creds.
I’ve had good luck. Reliable and fast as any other service.
I’m a 3rd year subscriber of the Unlimited plan, $158 for 2 years at a time. I utilize the drive, aliases, mail and VPN.
No real complaints. I still use Google calendar because it integrated more with Android phone. I still consider going back to Gmail occasionally for simplicity. I really hate Gmail though but email is garbage. Does it really matter?
I basically priced out good vpn’s, and the two year price of proton was pretty similar to most other quality VPN plans. So why not stick with it and get the rest of the ecosystem too.
I don’t think about it too much, it’s email and it works.
I do not care about secure email because I don’t communicate with anyone else using it, but I do like how it automatically blocks trackers and cleans email links for me.
I really tried, a few times and I just can’t make it exciting. I find it so boring to search for people and tags I wantto follow. That said, I wasn’t a huge Twitter user before, and i don’t have bluesky. I’m just hoping one day, mastodon clicks with me.
They are sata drives.
Seagate Exos X16. 6 of them refurb is still $800.
The case is hot swap with just an hba connection so I can let zfs do it’s thing.